Blu-ray has a huge storage space, and this is where the story begins. A single layer Blu-ray disc could store data up to 25GB, and a dual layer Blu-ray disc up to 50GB. It’s almost the double of HD DVD equivalent, which is the important reason why Blu-ray Disc defeated HD DVD in the war.

For the video codec, while HD DVD only supports MPEG-2 which is the same with DVD, Blu-ray disc also supports MPEG-4 AVC and SMPTE VC-1, besides MPEG-2. Below are the detailed introductions of these Blu-ray codecs. As followed, you will learn how to copy Blu-ray movies to PC and play with general media player and the Blu-ray player to watch Blu-ray movies without installing Blu-ray codecs.

Blu-ray Codecs

A codec is a computer program for encoding and decoding media contents with or without quality loss. Blu-ray disc mainly uses these video codecs for the high definition data storage:

MPEG-2

This is a lossy video codec used in both HD DVD and early Blu-ray Disc. Although MPEG-2 could be used as a high definition codec, it’s not optimized for low bit rates (but high quality pictures). Therefore, many movie studios now switch to other video codecs for Blu-ray disc.

MPEG-4 AVC

It’s the informal name of H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding). MPEG-4 AVC is the most widely used video codecs in Blu-ray discs. It supports 4096×2304 pixels in resolution and up to 26.7 Mbps for bit rate. This is the optimized video codec for Blu-ray, which delivers high quality picture even at the low bit rate than MPEG-1 in VCD.

Besides used in Blu-ray discs, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) codec is also widely adopted to stream online videos, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and the iTunes Store.

SMPTE VC-1

VC-1 is initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft, and is released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006. SMPTE VC-1 is the best alternative to MPEG-4 AVC codec for Blu-ray disc. It supports the interlaced video sequences without converting to progressive first. And of course, VC-1 also supports progressive content encoding.

Blu-ray Player for All Blu-ray Codecs

You could play Blu-ray movies with UFUSoft Blu-ray player, which is one easy-to-use player software for windows 8/7/Vista/XP PC, laptop or HTPC. It can help users enjoy any Blu-ray movie (Retail BD disc included) with outstanding and perfect video quality at home, which can not only play Blu-ray Disc, but also support Blu-ray folder and ISO image files. This Blu-ray Player is reliable and expert in playing Blu-ray discs released in different regions and dates trough simple clicks of mouse and is also capable of playing popular video files in HD video, AVCHD video, MTS, M2TS, MXF, TS, TRP, MKV, MPEG, FLV, WMV, and MP4, etc formats.

For Mac(Mountain Lion,OS X Lion,Snow Leopard) users, the option is UFUSoft Mac Blu-ray Player. These two Blu-ray players installed their own video codecs for Blu-ray disc so that you don’t have to install Blu-ray codec yourself.

Rip/Convert Blu-ray Movies to Play on Computer

UFUSoft Blu-ray Ripper is a great tool to rip/convert Blu-ray movies to HD MKV/HD AVI/HD MP4/HD MPG/HD WMV, etc or SD video formats to hard drive so that you can play with general media players or portable players, without installing additional video codes.

UFUSoft Blu-ray Copy is an useful tool to copy Blu-ray movies to hard drive with lossless quality so that you can play on computer, without installing additional video codes. So you could freely enjoy the Blu-ray movie without damaging my Blu-ray collections.